Sometimes we need a guardian angel, and this is never truer than when we are traveling on a journey that we have never taken before, walked roads we have never walked, and experience life in a whole new way. A few years ago, I had just such an angel guide me through a foreign land. This is not a metaphor; I literally had a man named Angel as a tour guide when I took a trip to the Yucatan Peninsula in southern Mexico where I visited the Mayan ruins at Tulum. It was my good fortune to have Angel to lead me.
Angel was not a messenger from God, wings, and bright light angel. My angel was a Mayan who guided me and my fellow travelers through the ruins and around Tulum. He gave me glimpse of what it would have been like to be a Mayan a thousand years ago. Without Angel I would have been lost and had no one to translate the native language and never would have gotten to where I wanted to go or understood it if I got there.
Over six hundred years ago the Spaniards sailed across the Atlantic and landed on the Yucatan peninsula and came face to face with the Mayan people. They were not prepared to speak Mayan. The Spaniards were basically lost, had no prior knowledge of the language and were without a translator. Because of this, many mistakes were made.
According to Angel many of the names used for the area are mistaken names that came out of these clumsy first encounters.
The word Yucatan, as in the Yucatan Peninsula, comes from the Mayan phrase for “listen to how they speak.” When the Spaniards would ask “what is this land called?” The Mayans listening to the foreign Spanish words and accents would say to each other “listen to how they speak” or Yucatan. The Spaniards took this as the name of the land.
The town of Tulum where the ruins are located comes from the Mayan phrase stinky land. Tulum is a swamp, and the Mayans had no word for swamp so when the Spaniards asked what is this place the Mayans responded Tu for stinky and Lum for land. These are just a couple of the mistakes made when the Spaniards came upon a foreign culture completely unknown to them.
Six hundred years later I visited the Mayans with no more preparation for understanding the language and the culture than the first Spaniards. If it weren’t for Angel preparing me, I would have dug right into the salsa—made with habanero peppers—and possible spent the next five minutes waiting for the heat to wear off. According to Angel, no water or anything else will take the heat away. Time—about 5 minutes according to Angel—is the only relief. Those can be longest five minutes of a person’s life.
It is good to know a thing or two about the places we are going. In life, we are tossed into unknown circumstances without much understanding. New jobs, new relationships, new diagnosis, all of these things can feel like walking into a foreign land filled with people speaking a language different than you have ever heard before. When this happens, the best we can do is seek out those who have been there before—maybe have lived there all their life-- and let them help us navigate. Sage voices can tell us things that we would only learn through mishap, errors, and pain.
Whether you believe in mystical guardian angels or not, know that there are real life, flesh, and blood angels all around you. Seek them out. Look for the guides that can lead you through life’s ever-changing terrain. We are here to be one another’s guides. Each of us can be an Angel, a tour guide, ready to travel with others when they are lost or confused or unfamiliar with the areas in life that we have already explored or where we have always lived.
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